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town at Sparrows Point or in the surrounding communities. Soap-boxing against
Bethlehem in distant Baltimore occurred, but with little effect The workers were
demoralized and frightened; one frustrated pro-union militant maintained hope by
keeping track of the workers who had scabbed during the great 1919 steel strike
and fantasizing revenge. While the SMWIU activists managed to put out a monthly
mimeographed newsletter for the Bethlehem steel workers, make surreptitious
contacts, and involve themselves with some struggle in 1934, little progress was
possible at the time or for a number of years after. Indeed, apart from the activities
of a small local of the Furniture Workers Industrial Union (TUUL), Baltimore's
Communists appear to have made little headway in any of Baltimore's mass
production industries during these years.

The greatest trade-union success of the Baltimore Communists during the
early 1930s was in a very different sector of the industrial working class: the
seamen. Unlike the steel workers, the seamen's conditions of labor had been little
socialized by modern industrial development. Unlike the steel workers, their
numbers were relatively modest. Only 2,367 sailors and deckhands were counted in
the Baltimore area in 1930, compared to 28,709 counted in the iron and steel
manufacture a few years later. Moreover, the seamen were among the least rooted
of all workers in a Baltimore community, and they were often viewed by
Baltimoreans as transients and pariahs. Among even those seamen who considered
Baltimore their home port, few had any strong ties there, permanent homes,
families, or settled friends. Their social world was a shifting, overwhelmingly male
community of cramped ships and waterfront districts of port cities all over the
country and the world. However their very rootlessness, lack of possessions and
obligations, marginality, and international experience helped give rise to
profoundly radical tendencies.

The vehicle for the Communist-led organizing among the seamen was the
Marine Workers Industrial Union (MWIU), like the Steel and Metal Workers